Eastern seaboard ports are preparing to accept shipments of goods being rerouted from the Port of Baltimore, officials and private-sector distributors told The Hill.
“We’ve been in tons of meetings all day trying to figure out what to do about this,” said MacKenzie Chalmers, an administrative coordinator at marine terminal and industrial rail operator Tradepoint Atlantic, which works with big brands like Amazon, Home Depot, McCormick, BMW and Volkswagen, among others.
In a statement, the company said it has been in constant contact with city and state officials during what it calls an “extremely challenging situation.”
Multiple East Coast ports told The Hill Tuesday that they had extra capacity to absorb additional shipments, suggesting that effects on overhead costs and consumer prices could be muted.
The Baltimore Port specializes in what is known in the shipping industry as “roll on, roll off” cargo, which is vehicles and heavy machinery as opposed to containers. Experts say the commercial effects of the bridge collapse could most directly affect shipments of automobiles.
“Baltimore is very significant in terms of … consumer goods, cars and other things the US imports from abroad…Probably what’s going to be affected most is deliveries of new cars, for example,” shipping analyst John Kartsonas, who manages two shipping-focused ETFs, wrote in a commentary.
Read more here from The Hill’s Tobias Burns.
